Economist: The Government Saved £200m and Created a £1bn Problem

27:35It provides, I think, across Germany, I think it's like two thirds of the workforce are employed in those kinds of jobs. We're both with big businesses and with small and medium sized businesses. So they've got this general kind of commitment to a degree of community, right, which they counterbalance with things like having to be efficient, right, having to invest in technology and having to grow. And they do have a world-leading manufacturing sector, right, which kind of provides the engine for this. And another part of that is labor. Labor relations are so much better in Germany. They've got workers present on the boards of large corporations.

28:18They've got unions, which are, they've got much higher rates of union membership in the first place. But the unions also actually have a seat at the table in how policy is decided on a national scale and they kind of make agreements like, well, okay, you know, you compromise here, we'll compromise here and we'll be able to weather a recession. For instance, sometimes they actually cut wages, unions in recessions in Germany or freeze them just to weather the recession and prevent layoffs, right? So it's like, it's this compromise, right? It's not, and this is why I like Germany. Tube drivers aren't doing that.

28:49I was going to say, it's the opposite of what we're doing. At the day we're speaking about this, there's a unionised movement at the minute, which is the tube drivers. and I wonder how many people would be like, oh yeah, unions sound great and with that backdrop. And it's not even about pay,

29:01Cahal Moran:it's about like their timetables and working four or five days a week for the same... It's definitely not about the public of London getting to work on time. We have very adversarial like labour relations in this country. And also a lot of, it's very concentrated. So, you know, tube drivers are famously one of the more unionised sectors, but then a lot of people aren't really part of unions and so they probably feel a bit peeved that like... They also have lots of power because they shut the capital down and it's very expensive, so they get what they want. Whereas other unions don't have that level of leverage.

29:34It's a bad example because it's basically if 20 guys strike guys or girls, London loses 200 million quid a day. So they're like, pay them more because, you know, it's not a reflection of the union. It's just that they just so happen to have a lot of power, don't they? Yeah, they do. And it's not sort of brought in politically. I mean, I spoke about independent central banks. I think that one of the things that would be really nice is to have other parties at the table in some of these negotiations over inflation, right? And that would include labor, but it would also include businesses and, you know, maybe local governments or whatever community groups, right?

30:11And then you can actually kind of reach a compromise. Because it's not... The thing about Germany that I... Why I like it as an example, it is a real country. it's not a perfect country it's a country with quite a difficult history and you know then re-unification is in living memory for a lot of people in Germany right um it's a big like country geographically economically and population wise and so they have to make all these compromises and they have all these difficult decisions around management it's just that they tend to bring people in to them right and you know you actually in Cameron and Osborne often talked about how we're all in this together during austerity and i remember because david cameron basically gave that speech while he was like standing wearing like in like full robes with a gold scepter it was a really infamous image and he was at this like gold table with a gold just talking about how we have to share the pain it was just ridiculous but in germany it seems more so uh than than us They are kind of in it together.

31:14And is the average German benefiting from that approach versus the average Brit, say, over the last 20, 30 years? Yeah, yeah, I think so. So if you look at things like housing and pensions and employment, they do tend to be more affordable, more stable in Germany. One of the really interesting things about Germany is that they're actually a nation of renters. They're not really a nation of homeowners. And we love the idea of owning our own home in the UK and in a lot of Anglo-sphere countries. But it kind of seems like it's ended up costing us more. And also when you've got a mortgage, you don't really truly own the home like the bank owns it until you pay it off.

31:54It's very unproductive capital. There's a trillion sat in bricks that could be in the markets, could be seeking return elsewhere, rather than just be, you know, where we are in London, you walk in any direction and all the houses are a million quid and that's crazy, you know. That is crazy, really. It's just so hard. Yeah. But the renters in Germany, they have a lot of protections, right? They have protections that mean that it's as secure as home ownership in this country. And so it's not considered – people always say in the UK, no, you're just throwing money away if you do that. It's not considered throwing money away.

32:26So I think that, yeah, generally speaking, I think there's some stats that bear this out, like kind of higher average income and lower house prices and stuff. but i know a lot of people in germany as well and that just it is easier to eke out a stable life there than it than it has become in in the uk for most people it's devolved as well quite well it's not a centralized economy right so there's big cities there that are all thriving and obviously we have the manchester example which is kind of in spite of a london focus manchester has risen but the german model seems does oh there's just this um this yeah every city kind of has its own thing in germany right so you've got like berlin is the capital but frankfurt is the the financial center right um and then there's like stable employment there's lots of manufacturing firms down in munich and hamburg like it's it's really really much more balanced regionally and i actually people talk about inequality right the one that resonates with me the most is regional inequality because I think to go to an entire area and you know you guys been to areas across the country you know we're in London right we're in quite a nice bit of London Manchester as you mentioned is doing quite well some of the other cities Bristol Brighton maybe are doing pretty well but for a lot of the country you go there and you just it just seems like a different different country entirely as a northerner I live in the north I mean I identify as Northern because I've been there longer than anywhere else.

34:02I grew up in Birmingham in the Midlands. I come to London and I'm just like, they're constantly just building stuff here. Whereas I could go back to areas where I grew up and they look the exact same. They have not changed at all. Same bus stops, same services. And it's like, oh, a billion pound project just to widen this train station in London. Whereas you don't get any of that spend up North. I knew a guy from Kidderminster and he used to say, this was years and years ago. Do you remember the prediction that the world was going to end in in 2012 yes yeah my own calendar would run out he said he said he wasn't worried about that because living in kidderminster he realized the world ended like 20 years ago yeah it's like the land that time forgot kind of thing it's just frozen yeah um and it is kind of baffling that kind of that regional inequality when you realize that the majority of the population live outside the m25 so to hamstring the majority of your population is kind of a wild decision right you know if you lift those up to just the average the whole country would benefit massively rather than trying to eke another five percent out of london productivity exactly you know and it obviously it does become hard in london as well because everybody's coming here you just said the average well i don't know if it's the average but a lot of houses are like one million pounds right yeah yeah exactly so you know it sort of becomes harder when you put all this pressure on one place.

35:25You have a lot of the economy just in one centre. It doesn't really work. And one of the interesting things, we were talking about austerity. There are two big decisions economically, well, three if you include the pandemic response. But before the pandemic, there was austerity and there was Brexit. Both of those have been really bad for regional inequality because the public sector generally has a bigger presence in poorer areas, right? It generally is disproportionately a higher employer. People tend to use public services more, right? In London, I don't know the stats on this for sure. I'm sure a higher percentage of people have bupa healthcare, right?

36:03Rather than over the rest of the country. But the second, yeah, is Brexit. And the EU did invest for all its flaws, invested quite a lot in a lot of these regions. That's why Manchester is doing well. Well, after the Manchester bombing, they supported money and they redeveloped Blackfriars, which is an area of Salford, which is just down. Yes. It was EU money that... I used to live in Manchester as well. That's where I did my degree, right? So I was actually there for eight years. And yeah, it actually, over the time from, what was this, 2011 to 2019... I moved there in 2010. So I saw the same kind of period.

36:37You saw this really, really big, big transformation. And since I left, it's even better. When I go back there, I'm just like, wow, this is a different place. It's insane, yeah. Yeah, and you see the release valve that it's given London. Because I go, I'm in Manchester all the time, and I speak to people, and they're like, oh, I moved up from London because I could get a job here, I could transfer, and I could buy a house, and, you know, it's a nice city. And you see how it's relieved a bit of the pressure for young people who have now got another option for a big city life. I would say Parliament to Manchester is one of my big sort of proposals that I, and I stole it, I read it in The Economist magazine a while ago, but uh they were basically saying that you know you i said that germany shares all of its different centers it's manufacturing financial it's political we don't it's basically all in london um cultural and media often as well right and uh yeah moving parliament away from the old boys westminster abbey which is like falling apart by the way so they need to they need to repair it moving that away and like to like there's a big conference building in manchester i forget it's next is that Right in the middle.

37:43Right in the middle, yeah. I call it the G-Mex. I think that's the old name. Right by the Hilton. I know what you mean, the dome. They have the party conferences there. They have the party conferences there already. It's a much newer building. It's very big. You could have Parliament there, and it would just take one of the centres of the UK away from London, away from the south, and up to the north. And I just think that would do a lot. Everyone's talking about the Northern Powerhouse. Then they had High Speed 2, which didn't really work. But like that would be a really good way to like rebalance regional inequality.

38:14And I mean, within England, I'm sure any Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish viewers are screaming right now about this. But yeah, within England, at least. I mean, you make them take that Avanti West Coast train line, they would soon realise like, okay, we need to do something about this. That's the other thing. Let's start actually going to places. Someone who never left London. Yeah, literally. Yeah, I mean, okay, so the German model and how they do things, how realistic is it or how hopeful is it that we could pull ideas from there and implement them in our economy? I think so. In one sense, there's some very deep cultural roots of this type of thing, right?

38:53Germany is a nation where they are much more collectivist. If you've been there, then you'll know that social norms are enforced very, very strongly. I remember when I went there during the pandemic and I took my mask off for like, I swear, a second. And I just heard mask. I was like, where did that come from? It was just the voice of the German people. so they're really hot on like social norms collectivism in a way that we really aren't and you can't you know i don't think no if we ever really will be right as as british people so i don't think you can just emulate it um you know exactly uh but what i do think that you can do is for a start you know simply reverse some of the austerity and have we are really starved for a lot of public investment in public services and social services.

39:45So that would be one move that I think is entirely possible. Investment in something like a Green New Deal as well, I think is well within the realms of possibility. And one other thing I'd like to see is like, and bear in mind, as partly, I think, in response to some of the debates about economists being detached that we've had, the Bank of England did start to do some more kind of participatory democratic stuff. And it's limited. But I think, you know, ideas like having things like jury duty, but within policy areas, and, you know, having people be able to participate in these debates and have some final say over it.

40:29They actually did it in Ireland, I think it was an economic one. It was with the abortion referendum, but they had something like that in Ireland. I think that's something that the Bank of England have made moves towards. And I would like to see that because if you're talking about a direct connection between experts and people, then you cut out the middlemen of politicians. And I can understand why people complain about politicians, right? Experts complain about them because they mess everything up. People don't trust them. So connect to the experts, to the people directly. That's the solution that I would have.

41:01So I guess those are just some simple pragmatic moves. And I'd like to see a lot more but uh just to keep it you know uh achievable well if we talk about achievable then the investment side of things would obviously require oops it's all right um you give it a wipe there you see got it right there it'll be it'll be yeah that's gonna be there for a couple minutes yeah it's okay it's okay don't worry i'll spill some water on damien to make you feel better shows you're a real person mate don't worry about it no so funding of that investment yeah how how would you be doing that i think what you've one of the big issues that we have at the moment is that people think about public services solely in terms of cost so you hear a lot about public debt and this started from well maybe forever but this started with austerity and cameron and osborne emphasizing the debt side of the ledger you still hear it now you hear Reeves and Starmer saying similar things.

41:58And like I said to you earlier, I understand when borrowing costs are now actually quite high, and debt interest payments are really high as a percentage of government spending. I do understand why people are scared by that. But what you do have to think about is the asset side. And it feels like everyone talks about the public sector as if it's just this thing that's in debt. And that's never the way you really think about any business or any investment, right? You have to think, okay, what are we actually getting back? for our money. And it's long-term, which is why it's difficult to trust politicians to do it.

42:30But if you're thinking about things like investment in childcare in general, and health for children, education for children, especially young children, for example, food for pregnant mothers, there's a lot of evidence that that kind of just pays for itself over the long term. Because what you end up with is a generation where they've had a good, stable upbringing, they have lower health costs. They're less likely to commit crimes, right? They tend to get more education, higher pay, better jobs pay back into the system. They're not on benefits and they earn more money. So you get more taxes, less social cost, right?

43:02This is it, right? It's an investment in education. Totally, yeah. And there are, I mean, actually, to be fair to Reeves and Starmer, they did do this a little bit. They kind of shifted some of the accounting. But yeah, like thinking about some of this, we've been talking about how the economy is actually people, right? Thinking about people as an asset that you're investing in. And that's what, it's not just the government spending just goes nowhere, right? And we already talk about physical infrastructure, but social infrastructure, this is sometimes called, you can think about that as investment.

43:33Now, that doesn't mean that every project is going to pay for itself or return dividends. There are plenty of bad projects out there, like High Speed 2, for instance, that was physical infrastructure. It was a terrible idea, I think, poorly executed, right? And it cost loads and loads of money at a time of austerity. But, you know, I think people have this very narrow view. They're just like, oh, how much is this going to cost? They're not like, how much is this going to benefit us? Does this now lead into modern monetary theory, do you think? Which I know we want to, our audience have asked us and we wanted to talk to you about it a bit.

44:03It sounds like you're more investment breeds returns rather than we're an economy that prints our own currency. So let's crank that. Yeah. So I do have a lot of agreements with MMT and I'm kind of MMT adjacent, but I do agree my yeah can we start by defining it if you can can i define it as an economist let me give

44:25Cahal Moran:it a go so modern monetary theory is uh countries like the uk and america can print their own money whereas countries in the eurozone can't yeah yeah but you could give a better description so that so that means we can never be bankrupt yeah we always have the ability to create more cash and we should i think the key distinction or one of the the things is that in politics we always link the public spend to the household and we imply that it's the same oh we need to tighten our budget pay down our debt whereas the argument is that you cannot create money you can only ever earn it a country with its own central bank can create money there's we're going to get into it but broadly i mean the household analogy is a good unifying one because also you know with a household it's not the case that sort of if you spend money it comes back to you right there's not that kind of cycle of investment.

45:17You spend money, then it's gone, basically, for the most part. You create taxable events throughout the system. Yeah, exactly. So that sort of disputing of the household analogy is something I do share with MMTers. But yeah, this idea of we print our own currency, therefore, any debt we have, we can necessarily print it, monetize it, that's what it's called, right? And then you don't necessarily have to go bankrupt. And I think that MMT is technically right in that. And I think also it's fitting that it emerged at a time of austerity. I think when the exact opposite narrative, the household tightening your belt narrative was very dominant, and MMT really challenged that.

46:03And if you get into the technicalities of it, and I'm not really an expert in this area, it's like with the accounting, the laws surrounding this, then what MMTers will say is, well, basically, governments and central banks, they're always kind of in conversation. Their accounts kind of have to balance anyway, because that's how the system just works, right? Otherwise, it doesn't work. And central banks are constantly buying government debt. They are just doing that. That's been happening since before the financial crisis, right? It's increased by loads since the financial crisis. So they just want to bring that above board and maybe think about, because a lot of money creation is kind of funneled through the financial sector, right?

46:50Via mostly government bonds, but quantitative easing extended this to a whole bunch of like sort of corporate bonds and like, you know, other financial assets in the private sector. So they're saying, well, OK, it seems like the central bank is printing money in order to assist financial markets and governments and corporations, but they're not doing it. Why can't they just print money and help people a bit, right? If everybody's struggling with their bills, say, during the coronavirus pandemic, right? Why can't they just say, OK, well, here's a bit of a bailout? And I think that's a completely reasonable point to make.

47:28but you know you get into a question about what it actually means in practice most of the time and I guess that's a that's a question where there's um a lot a lot of room for debate because you can different people will have like different proposals around that actually and MMTers tend to have some very specific proposals about what we should do that I'm not sure I entirely um agree with um but yeah yeah so the few points on the mmt i think there's like a i can't remember what the book's called but it's really good and it explains it debunks each of the myths and is that randy ray the seven myths about modern money or something like that or warren mosler sorry it's a female author american bernie sanders the deficit myth the deficit yeah the deficit this if you want to get a book about mmt i reckon that's the one i've read that made it click because i'm i'm into money and this is still quite i've had to consume a lot of content to even try and wrap my head around it because i honestly believe it's counterintuitive to the what i've been fed about an economy my whole life so it challenged you know like interesting print money get inflation they were there as they'd be like well not maybe not you know like not um i think one of the good things in it is the whole if uh if a government operates in a in a deficit they're adding money into the economy whereas if they operate a surplus they're extracting value from the population so only a government in a deficit can be pushing money into the system essentially because they have to print that deficit or whatever or create money or well this is like why i didn't like the um the osborne cameron you know it's both types of debt because i think if you're reducing both then what's going into the economy unless you have an export boom which just wasn't really going to happen to us, right?

49:16We don't really have a world-class manufacturing sector anymore. So yeah, if you're reducing both types of debt, then you are necessarily taking money out of the economy. You're just shrinking the economy, right? So you're not growing. One thing I can't wrap my head around with MMT, and I'd be interested in what you thought, is the inflation point of if we print cash because we can, do we not just create inflation? I think it just, you can do, of course you can do. It really depends on how much and what for, right? Which comes back to the point about investment. It's like, what are you using this money for?

49:54Are you printing too much? And I think you need to have very clear and credible policies around that. One of the really interesting things, because mainstream economists have been kind of at loggerheads with MMTers, and then there's that exact weird debate that I kind of talked about where everyone just sort of hates each other. And then you look at what they're actually saying, it's kind of similar in practice. But there's a book called Central Banking 101 by Joseph Wang. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's such a good explanation for anyone just of the plumbing of the monetary system from a guy who works at the Federal Reserve, Central Bank of the USA.

50:35And he just explains the financial system, including central banks, including governments. And then at the end, he sort of, it's a really good book, but at the end, he addresses MMT very briefly. And his argument is basically that we can't depart from the very specific framework for inflation targeting that we have at the moment, where central banks just set interest to target 2 % inflation, roughly. We can't depart from that because it might be incredible. It might lead expectations around inflation to become unmoored, and then you get an inflationary spiral and stuff. And I thought that was really interesting because I think he said more than he realized.

51:15Because what he was basically admitting is that the entire system is just based on trust. The entire monetary system is based on trust and credibility. And when you look at countries that have hyperinflation, it's where everything has broken down. It's not just that they're printing money. They are at war. There's a revolution. There's a lot of political upheaval. Corruption. People talk about corruption. Exactly. you know, all of that kind of stuff. And no, or like, all of, there's just no productive capacity in the economy, right? It's like either it's been bombed or whatever. Yeah, Hungary, the Pengo, was it, that collapsed is like 150 ,000 % inflation in a single day.

51:52Yeah, exactly. Because like 90 % of their factories have been destroyed in the war. Exactly. So they just had nothing left. And they were like, well, let's just print cash. That's literally it. So really what you need to look at is exactly that. Again, it comes back to like the assets, the assets that the economy has. Having credible rules is absolutely important, but we shouldn't just assume that because we have inflation targeting now, and that's the policy around money creation, and it only has been for, it changed in our lifetimes, right? That's not like it's ordained from God. That's the only way we can do things.

52:26I think MMT is best. Firstly, its description of the financial system is really good. It's much better and more accurate than most economics textbooks when I was studying. But secondly, it opens up the space to have that actual serious debate about like, how much money can we print? Who does it go to? What are we using it for? How are we going to establish that it's credible, that there's trust in the money system? And maybe 5 % inflation isn't bad if you're getting 7 % wage growth or whatever, because we've invested in higher manufacturing or better jobs or whatever. The one thing about MMT that strikes me as it seems technical and it seems like it would need people in control in charge of it that know exactly what they're doing yeah and how do you stop politicians going well let's just print some money to give some money away because then we'll win the next election yeah i think that one of the interesting things was that a lot of mmt's tend to be more on the lefty side and we saw it sort of get adopted by republicans who were like oh no we could just cut taxes for the rich because of mmt we could just run whatever and so you get you end up with it the whole message kind of kind of being corrupted uh by politics i suppose i wish i had a good answer for that i feel

53:38Cahal Moran:like everything politicians experts so one of one of the criticisms i've read about mmt online was it described as a perpetual motion machine these machines where it's like look it creates its own energy and it keeps going around and when you get behind it there's always a battery hidden in the machine somewhere right like something powering it yeah but you you alluded to there that there are certain types of spending where it pays for itself so it could be justified that we create money to invest to produce a return one was education yeah what are some others um so homelessness is a really big one um housing giveaways to people people who don't have houses but want them.

54:20I think it sounds quite crazy to a lot of people, partly because buying a house is so difficult. And then you're like, oh, you're just going to give it away to people. But the simple fact is that it's really, really effective. And a bunch of places have pursued it. I think both Sweden and Finland have pursued it. There are a couple of US states that have. And basically, getting someone into a house off the street makes them much more likely to get a job. It makes them much less likely to commit crimes. It improves their health. And in addition, and this is a bit depressing, but, you know, homeless people do, rough sleepers especially, do tend to die at some point.

55:01And like, there are even costs to that, right? When they're like, you know, getting them off the street and getting them buried and stuff. And so I think, personally, homelessness has gotten so much worse in this country over like my adult life. And I find it actually quite unbearable. But even if you're just scrooging it, even if you're just like counting the pennies, these programs, it just has been shown that they just save more money than they cost. Because it just doesn't actually cost that much to put someone up somewhere, right? You know, you're not talking about a mansion or something, right?

55:33You're just talking about a place to sleep, a very basic sort of flat or something. And then they get back on their feet and then they can sort of get off the program. Would you say social housing in general doesn't need to just be homeless would you say like the the investment in housing i think there's an argument for that yeah i think you could broaden that um i don't want to make a blanket claim that it's all going to definitely pay for itself but like yeah absolutely investment in housing because because it's so important right and if there's housing available then you you've got things like in purely economic terms people are getting matched to the right jobs in the right places right so it's better for the for the overall economy if you've got housing costs on the other hand, keeping people out of somewhere that they should be, right, then you've got a less efficient economy.

56:15You can also control rental prices a bit more because landlords get a bad shtick, but they're just a feature of supply and demand in the sense of there's no social housing, private landlord rental sector emerges, and there's a real lack of housing in that sector. So the rent prices keep going up. You can go on right move and there's like one house in a town to rent. Whereas if you put a load of social housing there or cheaper housing to rent, yeah, you create a floor. You add supply, right? So that's going to bring down the price. You add supply at a low cost. And then people aren't spending 40 % of their income on rent.

56:51And like you said earlier, they will spend it on other stuff, right? They are going to spend it on other stuff. That's why I hate gambling, like the gambling industry, because people act like, well, if they pay so much tax, it's wonderful. It's like, well, no, if you deleted it, people would just spend that money elsewhere in the economy on more productive things. They don't get Denise Coates another helicopter. Yeah, so yeah, I think, are there any other examples? Social housing? So I think social housing, like education, childcare, and care for like pregnant mothers as well, and, you know, healthcare to an extent.

57:30I mean, there was one local council where there's a sort of, that they found that during austerity they just lost, I think they lost, they cut 200 million in like preventative care. I don't know if I did the right amount to use there. But they ended up costing them 1 billion in crisis care down the line. because it's sort of like if you don't, you know, if you don't cut this limb off now, then your whole body's going to go gangrene and you don't. So healthcare needs to take place like as soon as possible and then you save the most money. Well, you cut mental health services and then all your ambulances are just filled with crisis for mental health conditions.

58:17Exactly the same thing. And then everyone's dying of heart attacks because it's an hour for an ambulance. And it's like, you just shunt it somewhere else and you can't be doing it. Exactly, yeah, yeah. I think about it as a bit like, you know, like a lump of air in the carpet. it you sort of press it down it just comes back up somewhere else you can't just magic away those social costs like they're gonna they're gonna turn up somewhere and when you say education to what level do you mean university not university so this is you know if everybody's thinking of your viewers is thinking there's nothing this guy doesn't want to spend government money on i don't think that applies to university i actually think it applies at most to secondary school and this is just what the where the evidence points right but certainly up to primary school level where you're talking basic literacy you know basic uh mathematics and things like that that just allow people to participate in modern society in the modern economy right as far as university education um that's not going to pay for itself i don't know i think i don't know if i think university education should be free um maybe not but uh yeah it's certainly not an example where you just get that like sort of magic i think i mean if it was free 50 of people can't go you know you need to raise the bar again in terms of what it means to go and and change and change as well you know the the fact that it's sort of a requirement now for to get any sort of job and it's like it's weird because it's like yeah the the graduate premium has started to disappear i think it's disappeared everywhere but london right and so it's like you've got this weird situation where you kind of you kind of have to have a degree but then it doesn't really help as much as you thought and there's there aren't other avenues you're getting employed by someone without a degree telling you that you need a 2.1.

59:54I had managers that were like, oh, I just got straight into work, mate. I didn't get a degree. He wasted the money. It's like, you told me I needed a 2.1 to get this job. And he's all just box ticking, filters people out. Literally, yeah. And then you never use it again beyond that.

1:00:07Cahal Moran:Yeah. Absolutely. So to finish off, what's one thing you want our audience to understand differently about economics after listening to this conversation? I would like them to, not to think of economics and tough times as synonymous, right? I don't want them to think, oh, the economy and economics just means that everything's going to get worse. It's all just cuts. Economics can't really help me. The economy can't help me. I think that there are cases where you run up against real constraints. Of course, there are plenty of them. But there are also cases where, like, what's good for people is the same as what's good for the economy.

1:00:48And I don't think you should let people tell you that that's not the case.

1:00:54Normally, this is where we'd say this isn't financial advice, and it really isn't. But if you want to speak to a good financial advisor, then we might be able to help.

1:01:02Cahal Moran:We've partnered with a few advisors to offer a range of services, from one-off flat fee guidance to ongoing advice. I'm actually using the guidance service to sort out my finances. If you'd like to understand your options, there's a link in the description where you can answer a few questions and then book a free call with my colleague, Will, so you can figure out what might be right for you. This episode was produced by Ruth Edwards and it was filmed and edited by Ben and Jack at Flow Spire See you next week